The other night, one of my pups was run over by a mobike. Died very shortly after that. Sadly, she was the most aggressive of the pups, I had expectations she would be able to dominate and rule that road. The others pups are submissive.

We were thinking of beginning to release them by Feb 1st anyway, now i don't know.

One cook working in the house opposite tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He kept the body in their driveway for the night. The next morning he brought a spade and dug a hole in the tiny park nearby where i often take them. We buried her there. The next day I tried to give him a tip for all the help but he kept refusing. I was amazed at how much people have supported me.

I am sorry to hear about this. It sounds like stray dogs have a very tough life in your city.

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The next day I got some good news. One house opposite where they live, adopted the brown male. I haven't seen him since, but everyone tells me the owner had him shampooed, got him a nice coat, and has been feeding him chicken, liver etc and often brings him out carrying him in his lap.
So at least in the end, one will survive.

So i am now down to 2 dear pups, and of course the mother and the one year old, Raja.

Alexander Luria was born in Kazan, an old Russian University town east of Moscow. He entered Kazan University at the age of 16 and obtained his degree in 1921 at the age of 19. While still a student, he established the Kazan Psychoanalytic Association, and planned on a career in psychology. His earliest research sought to establish objective methods for assessing Freudian ideas about abnormalities of thought and the effects of fatigue on mental processes.

In 1923 his use of reaction time measures to study thought processes in the context of work settings won him a position at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow where he developed a psychodiagnostic procedure he referred to as the "combined motor method" for diagnosing individual subjects' thought processes. In this method (described in detail in Luria, 1932), subjects are asked to carry out three tasks simultaneously. One hand is to be held steady while the other is used to press a key or squeeze a rubber bulb in response to verbal stimuli presented by the experimenter, to which the subject is asked to respond verbally with the first word to come to mind. Preliminary trials are presented until a steady baseline of coordination is established. At this point, "critical" stimuli which the experimenter believes to be related to specific thoughts in the subject are presented. Evidence for the ability to "read the subject's mind" is the selective disruption of the previously established coordinated system by the critical test stimuli. This method was applied to a variety of naturally occurring and experimentally induced cases, providing a model system for psychodiagnosis that won widespread attention in the west when it was published.The book describing these studies was published in Russian only in 2002, owing to its association with psychoanalytic theorizing which was disapproved of by Soviet authorities.

In 1924 Luria met Lev Semionovich Vygotsky, whose influence was decisive in shaping his future career. Together with Vygotsky and Alexei Nikolaivitch Leontiev, Luria sought to establish an approach to psychology that would enable them to "discover the way natural processes such as physical maturation and sensory mechanisms become intertwined with culturally determined processes to produce the psychological functions of adults" (Luria, 1979, p. 43). Vygotsky and his colleagues referred to this new approach variably as "cultural," "historical," and "instrumental" psychology. These three labels all index the centrality of cultural mediation in the constitution of specifically human psychological processes, and the role of the social environment in structuring the processes by which children appropriate the cultural tools of their society in the process of ontogeny. An especially heavy emphasis was placed on the role of language, the "tool of tools" in this process: the acquisition of language was seen as the pivotal moment when phylogeny and cultural history are merged to form specifically human forms of thought, feeling, and action.

From the late 1920's until his death, Luria sought to elaborate this synthetic, cultural-historical psychology in different content areas of psychology. In the early 1930's he led two expeditions to Central Asia where he investigated changes in perception, problem solving, and memory associated with historical changes in economic activity and schooling. During this same period he carried out studies of identical and fraternal twins raised in a large residential school to reveal the dynamic relations between phylogenetic and cultural-historical factors in the development of language and thought.

In the late 1930's, largely to remove himself from public view owing to the period of purges initiated by Stalin, Luria entered medical school where he specialized in the study of aphasia, retaining his focus on the relation between language and thought in a politically neutral arena. The onset of World War 2 made his specialized knowledge of crucial importance to the Soviet war effort, and the tragic widespread availability of people with various forms of traumatic brain injury provided him with voluminous materials for developing his theories of brain function and methods for the remediation of focal brain lesions. It was during this period that he developed the systematic approach to brain and cognition which has come to be known as the discipline of neuropsychology. Central to his approach was the belief that "to understand the brain foundations for psychological activity, one must be prepared to study both the brain and the system of activity" (1979, p. 173). This insistence on linking brain structure and function to the proximal, culturally organized, environment provides the thread of continuity between the early and later parts of Luria's career.http://luria.ucsd.edu/bio.html

The orange tree (Citrus aurantium) is a small evergreen citrus revered for its fragrant blossoms and nourishing fruit. This tree thrives in warm climates and prefers moist, fertile, well-drained soil. Oranges are consumed for their flavor and high vitamin C content. They also contain significant amounts of calcium, potassium, vitamin A and thiamin.

Orange Origins

The orange tree originated in the jungles of India. The word orange itself is derived from the Sanskrit "nagrungo," which became the Spanish "naranja," and consequently the Italian "arancia," and the Provencal "orange," according to the "Encyclopedia Britannica." Oranges are praised in the ancient Indian pharmaceutical text the "Charaka Samhita" for their restorative qualities.

Oranges in East Asia and Europe

From India, oranges were imported to China. According to the "Yu Kung" manuscript, oranges and pomelos (the predecessor of the grapefruit) were offered as a gift to the Chinese Emperor Tayun, who reigned from 2205 until 2197 B.C, according to Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's "The History of Food." As in India, oranges were recognized in China for their nutritive properties, being noted in such texts as "Thousand Prescriptions of Great Price" and "Remedies for Immortality."

Oranges traveled along trade routes such as the Silk Road from Asia to the Mediterranean. In the 2nd century A.D. these luscious fruits made their debut on the banquet tables of wealthy Romans. They began to be cultivated in Northern Africa and Spain. Louis XIV ordered orange trees to be planted at Versailles, where their sweetly scented blossoms were used to decorate the Hall of Mirrors on special occasions. Orange blossoms have also been used to make an essential oil called "neroli," commonly used in perfumery.

Oranges in the Americas

Oranges were brought to the Americas with Spanish colonization. The first orange tree in the Western Hemisphere was planted in Haiti (then known as Hispaniola) in November 1493. In the United States, oranges became a staple crop in Florida and California. In the 1940s, frozen orange juice concentrate was developed by the United States Department of Agriculture and the Florida Citrus Commission. This product was shipped to war-torn Europe to provide nutrients to mothers and children.http://www.ehow.com/facts_7556109_history-orange-tree.html

During the glasnost period when many forgotten biographies were rediscovered and rewritten, one of the most bizarre finds was the Soviet-American inventor and pioneer of electr(on)ic music, Lev Sergeevich Termen (aka Léon Theremin, 1896-1993). Termen, “the secret link between sci-fi films, the Beach Boys, and Carnegie Hall,” whose “electronic musical instrument took the world by storm in the 1920s and '30s”(1) — several decades before the rise of electronic popular music — had been forgotten for 50 years in the East and West.

Only in the perestroyka period has Termen been credited with even more fantastic inventions, which seem to be right out of a spy novel. Back in Russia he invented two types of bugs–both based on his innovative principle of contactlessness and both aiming at abolishing the usual interfaces needed for eavesdropping.(49)

The first bug “Golden Mouth”/“Zlatoust“)(50) ……was placed in this seal, a present to the Americans(51) in 1945 by children from “Artek,” a Crimean pioneer camp.”(52) The wooden seal in the form of an eagle (codename “Zlatoust” which in Russian means “Golden Mouth”) contained Termen’s device and was hung up by the Americans in their embassy, in Harriman’s office. The usual bug hunting routine obviously failed to detect it since it was not a usual microphone but a “passive bug:”

Quivering with excitement, the technician extracted from the shattered depths of the seal a small device, not much larger than a pencil . . . capable of being activated by some sort of electronic ray from outside the building. When not activated, it was almost impossible to detect. . . . It represented, for that day, a fantastically advanced bit of applied electronics. (…) A radio beam was aimed at the antenna from a source outside the building. A sound that struck the diaphragm caused variations in the amount of space (and the capacitance) between it and the tuning post plate. These variations altered the charge on the antenna, creating modulations in the reflected radio beam. These were picked up and interpreted by the receiver.(53)

Not only its small size but also its simplicity made the device smart, considering spy technology in the 40s–by using a diaphragm with only an antenna for the bug itself and gaging it, if needed, with an electromagnetic wave:

The triumph of the Great Seal bug, which was hung over the desk of our Ambassador to Moscow, was its simplicity. It was simply a resonate chamber, with a flexible front wall that acted as a diaphragm, changing the dimensions of the chamber when sound waves struck it. It had no power pack of its own, no wires that could be discovered, no batteries to wear out. An ultra-high frequency signal beamed to it from a van parked near the building was reflected from the bug, after being modulated by sound waves from conversations striking the bug's diaphragm. (…) The Great Seal features a bald eagle, beneath whose beak the Soviets had drilled holes to allow sound to reach the device. At first, Western experts were baffled as to how the device, which became known as the Thing, worked, because it had no batteries or electrical circuits.(54)

“Golden Mouth” for many years seemed undetectable, and even after its discovery in 1952 it continued to be an enigmatic “Thing from Another World.”(55) It took 6 months for the British MI5 (USA experts had asked them for help) to figure out how Termen’s bug worked. Then they copied this elegant and minimalist eavesdropping system for their own use.(56)

Termen’s inventorial genius in the NKVD sharashka developed considerably: “the Thing” in hindsight seems far less sophisticated than Termen’s next invention–it was still an undetectable entity to be hunted down and removed.(57) If “the Thing” was marked by a typical Termenesque style of understatement, displaying an engineering elegancy, only Termen’s second bug was a strike of pure genius.

His second bug was a bug that did not exist–it was only the idea of a bug. It made use of all the membranes in the building to be controlled, including window panes and even screens in the walls meant to block bugging. This somewhat ironic meta-bug, called the “Buran” (“Blizzard”), was based on the fact that human voices produce sound waves which cause movement in certain surfaces. The Buran enabled one to listen to conversations at a distance up to 500 meters via an interferometer using infrared light to pick up and transmit information from vibrating surfaces onto a photocell (e.g. in the opposite house).(59) The Buran seems to have been the predecessor of laser microphones, still a novelty today and therefore mostly a prop of spy movies:

A laser microphone is an exotic application of laser technology. It consists of a laser beam that must be reflected off a glass window or another rigid surface that vibrates in sympathy with nearby sounds. This device essentially turns any vibrating surface near the source of sound into a microphone. It does this by measuring the distance between itself and the surface extremely accurately; the tiny fluctuations in this distance become the electrical signal of the sounds picked up. Laser microphones are new, very rare and expensive, and are most commonly portrayed in the movies as spying devices.(60)

The severe restrictions placed on art by Stalin and Khrushchev also helped cause Shostakovich to become disillusioned. Always afraid of official condemnation, he followed the leads of Ludwig van Beethoven, Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, and Modest Mussorgsky by writing music with profound themes buried underneath dominant themes of a banal nature and completely opposite sentiment. For his political safety, Shostakovich managed to keep his own voice while complying with the government's policy of "socialist realism" – art depicting the triumph of Leninism and the complete, if contrived, optimism of Soviet life. Still, Shostakovich was disciplined by the cultural authorities on several occasions, particularly when all of the USSR's leading composers, including Serge Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, and Nicolai Myaskovsky, were denounced for "formalism," or decadent avant-gardism, in 1948; this coming after a period of war when artists had greater creative freedoms.http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/shostakovich.php

The Metro Transit system has turned on great composers in hope of turning off loiterers, vagrants and other troublemakers attracted to the station. "If it encourages some people to wander away because it's not their favorite type of music, I guess that's OK," said Acting Transit Police Chief A.J. Olson.
The classical music strategy -- modeled after a transit campaign in Portland -- is part of a suite of initiatives to improve conditions at the station. They include more lights and security cameras and a beefed-up police presence during the hours immediately after school and in the evening. The station's design -- with enclosed spaces on two levels -- is unusual on the Hiawatha light-rail line and can attract trouble.
"It has these areas that are heated with overhead lamps," said Minneapolis City Council Member Gary Schiff. "People can just hang out there."
Metro Transit took action last summer after neighborhood residents complained about the station becoming a haven for rowdy teens and vagrants.
While vandalism and disorderly conduct were the most common problems in and near the station, two young men were stabbed and two others arrested last April after a fight broke out there.

Scene at the station

The musical strategy aims as much at creating a soothing ambience as irritating unappreciative troublemakers.

Every memory begins as a changed set of connections among cells in the brain. If you happen to remember this moment—the content of this sentence—it’s because a network of neurons has been altered, woven more tightly together within a vast electrical fabric. This linkage is literal: For a memory to exist, these scattered cells must become more sensitive to the activity of the others, so that if one cell fires, the rest of the circuit lights up as well....

Myosotis(Greek for "mouse ear") is a genus of flowering plants in the family Boraginaceac that are commonly called Forget me Nots .

And speaking of things 'mouse' (or "mus" = Northern Germanic), in Denmark mus is a children's game involving little brown cookies serving as 'mus'. In Sweden "mus" can also carry an 'adult' connotation, one requiring you to not think outside the 'box'.

Published on 14 December 2011 in the UIC electronic newsletter "UIC eNews" Nr 270.

Russian Railways and SNCF jointly inaugurate the first direct Moscow-Paris train at Gare de l’Est railway station

On 13 December, Russian Railways and SNCF jointly inaugurated the first direct Moscow-Paris train at Gare de l’Est railway station. The Russian delegation onboard the train, led by Russian Railways’ Vice-President Mikhaïl Akulov, was welcomed in a festive and friendly atmosphere.

The Moscow-Paris train is the second service to link Russia and France with a journey time of around 38 hours, and follows the launch of the Moscow-Nice train in September 2010. The 3,177 km-long trans-European route linking the two capitals enables trains to operate at line speeds of up to 200 km/h. The Moscow-Paris train will pass through five countries: Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany and France, and will serve the cities of Vyazma, Smolensk, Krasnoe, Orsha, Minsk, Brest, Terespol, Warsaw, Poznan, Rzepin, Oderburk, Frankfurt (Oder), Berlin, Hanover, Fulda, Frankfurt-am-Main and Saarbrücken.

The train times have been specifically scheduled so that passengers only spend one night onboard. The service will operate three times a week during the winter and five times a week during the summer. The train offers passengers three standards of travel, namely luxury, first-class and second-class carriages, as well as a dining car offering a wide variety of food and beverages. With regard to staff, all members of the crew speak several languages, have a higher education qualification and have completed a special training programme in the areas of psychology, culture and passenger service.http://www.uic.org/com/article/new-moscow-berlin-paris-passenger?page=thickbox_enews

My pups are 4 months old now. I learned the other day that there were actually 5 not 4. One brown one got adopted before i saw them. Another brown male got adopted again recently (he'd been adopted and abandoned 3 times).

If I leave at the wrong time in the morning to do the school run, the neighbouring farmer and his father will be moving the cows across the road and this will make me at least 10 minutes late...Really...

If I leave at the wrong time in the morning to do the school run, the neighbouring farmer and his father will be moving the cows across the road and this will make me at least 10 minutes late...Really...

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LOL! Oh, I hear rush hour can be pretty rough down in NZ, too, with the sheep.